<i>A Comparative History of Literatures in the Iberian Peninsula</i> is the second comparative history of a new subseries with a regional focus, published by the Coordinating Committee of the International Comparative Literature Association. As its predecessor for East-Central Europe, this two-volume history distances itself from traditional histories built around periods and movements, and explores, from a comparative viewpoint, a space considered to be a powerful symbol of inter-literary relations. Both the geographical pertinence and its symbolic condition are obviously discussed, when not even contested.<br />Written by an international team of researchers who are specialists in the field, this history is the first attempt at applying a comparative approach to the plurilingual and multicultural literatures in the Iberian Peninsula. The aim of comprehensiveness is abandoned in favor of a diverse and extensive array of key issues for a comparative agenda.<br /><i>A Comparative History of Literatures in the Iberian Peninsula</i> undermines the primacy claimed for national and linguistic boundaries, and provides a geo-cultural account of literary inter-systems which cannot otherwise be explained.

This book focusses on computer methodologies as a way of investigating language and character in literary texts. Both theoretical and practical, it surveys investigations into characterization in literary linguistics and personality in social psychology, before carrying out a computational analysis of Virginia Woolf’s experimental novel <i>The Waves</i>. Frequencies of grammatical and semantic categories in the language of the six speaking characters are analyzed using Wmatrix software developed by UCREL at Lancaster University. The quantitative analysis is supplemented by a qualitative analysis into recurring patterns of metaphor. The author concludes that these analyses successfully differentiate all six characters, both synchronically and diachronically, and claims that this methodology is also applicable to the study of personality in non-literary language. The book, written in a clear and accessible style, will be of interest to post-graduate students and academics in linguistics, stylistics, literary studies, psychology and also computational approaches.

This history for the first time charts the literature of the entire Caribbean, the islands as well as continental littoral, as one cultural region. It breaks new ground in establishing a common grid for reading literatures that have been kept separate by their linguistic frontiers. Readers will have access to the best current scholarship on the evolution of popular and literate cultures in the various regions since their earliest emergence.<br /><i>The History of Literature in the Caribbean</i> brings together the most distinguished team of literary Caribbeanists ever assembled, cutting across ideological commitments and critical methods. Differences in point of view between individual contributors are left intact here as the sign of the colonial inheritance of the region. Introductions and conclusions to the various sections of the History written by the respective subeditors, set them in proper perspective. The unique synoptic aspect of the History lies in its comprehensiveness and its range, which are unequaled.<br /><i>Contributors</i>: A. James Arnold, Julio Rodriguez-Luis, H. Lopez Morales, Maria Elena Rodriguez Castro, Silvio Torres Saillant, Seymour Menton, Ian I. Smart, Efrain Barradas, Raquel Chang-Rodriguez, Carlos Alonso, Ivan A. Schulman, W.L. Siemens, William Luis, Gustavo Pellon, Emilio Bejel, Sandra M. Cypess, Peter Earle, Adriana Mndez Rodenas, J. Michael Dash, Ulrich Fleischmann, Maximilien Laroche, Rgis Antoine, Lon-Franois Hoffmann, Randolph Hezekiah, Bridget Jones, F.I. Case, Marie-Denise Shelton, Beverly Ormerod, J. Michael Dash, Jack Corzani, Anthea Morrison, Juris Silenieks, Frantz Fanon, Vere Knight.

<i>Cross-Cultural Studies</i> is the culminating effort of a distinguished team of international scholars who have worked since the mid-1980s to create the most complete analysis of Caribbean literature ever undertaken. Conceived as a major contribution to postcolonial studies, cultural studies, cultural anthropology, and regional studies of the Caribbean and the Americas, <i>Cross-Cultural Studies</i> illuminates the interrelations between and among Europe, the Caribbean islands, Africa, and the American continents from the late fifteenth century to the present. Scholars from five continents bring to bear on the most salient issues of Caribbean literature theoretical and critical positions that are currently in the forefront of discussion in literature, the arts, and public policy.<br />Among the major issues treated at length in <i>Cross-Cultural Studies</i> are: The history and construction of racial inequality in Caribbean colonization; The origins and formation of literatures in various Creoles; The gendered literary representation of the Caribbean region; The political and ideological appropriation of Caribbean history in creating the idea of national culture in North and South America, Europe, and Africa; The role of the Caribbean in contemporary theories of Modernism and the Postmodern; The decentering of such canonical authors as Shakespeare; The vexed but inevitable connectedness of Caribbean literature with both its former colonial metropoles and its geographical neighbors.<br />Contributions to <i>Cross-Cultural Studies</i> give a concrete cultural and historical analysis of such contemporary critical terms as hybridity, transculturation, and the carnivalesque, which have so often been taken out of context and employed in narrowly ideological contexts.<br />Two important theories of the simultaneous unity and diversity of Caribbean literature and culture, propounded by Antonio Ben&#237;tez-Rojo and +douard Glissant, receive extended treatment that places them strategically in the debate over multiculturalism in postcolonial societies and in the context of chaos theory. A contribution by Ben&#237;tez-Rojo permits the reader to test the theory through his critical practice.<br />Divided into nine thematic and methodological sections followed by a complete index to the names and dates of authors and significant historical figures discussed, <i>Cross-Cultural Studies</i> will be an indispensable resource for every library and a necessary handbook for scholars, teachers, and advanced students of the Caribbean region.<br />

For the first time the Dutch-speaking regions of the Caribbean and Suriname are brought into fruitful dialogue with another major American literature, that of the anglophone Caribbean. The results are as stimulating as they are unexpected. The editors have coordinated the work of a distinguished international team of specialists. <br />Read separately or as a set of three volumes, the <i>History of Literature in the Caribbean</i> is designed to serve as the primary reference book in this area. The reader can follow the comparative evolution of a literary genre or plot the development of a set of historical problems under the appropriate heading for the English- or Dutch-speaking region. An extensive index to names and dates of authors and significant historical figures completes the volume. <br />The subeditors bring to their respective specialty areas a wealth of Caribbeanist experience. Vera M. Kutzinski is Professor of English, American, and Afro-American Literature at Yale University. Her book <i>Sugar&#8217;s Secrets: Race and The Erotics of Cuban Nationalism</i>, 1993, treated a crucial subject in the romance of the Caribbean nation. Ineke Phaf-Rheinberger has been very active in Latin American and Caribbean literary criticism for two decades, first at the Free University in Berlin and later at the University of Maryland. The editor of <i>A History of Literature in the Caribbean</i>, A. James Arnold, is Professor of French at the University of Virginia, where he founded the New World Studies graduate program. Over the past twenty years he has been a pioneer in the historical study of the N&#233;gritude movement and its successors in the francophone Caribbean.<br />

The era of Russian Symbolism (1892-1917) has been called the Silver Age of Russian culture, and even the Second Golden Age. Symbolist authors are among the greatest Russian authors of this century, and their activities helped to foster one of the most significant advances in cultural life (in poetry, prose, music, theater, and painting) that has ever been seen there. This book is designed to serve as an introduction to Symbolism in Russia, as a movement, an artistic method, and a world view. The primary emphasis is on the history of the movement itself. Attention is devoted to what the Symbolists wrote, said, and thought, and on how they interacted. In this context, the main actors are the authors of poetry, prose, drama, and criticism, but space is also devoted to the important connections between literary figures and artists, philosophers, and the intelligentsia in general. This broad, detailed and balanced account of this period will serve as a standard reference work an encourage further research among scholars and students of literature.

In recent years the language of Shakespearean drama has been described in a number of publications intended mainly for the undergraduate student or general reader, but the studies in academic journals to which they refer are not always easily accessible even though they are of great interest to the general reader and essential for the specialist. The purpose of this collection is therefore to bring together some of the most valuable of these studies which, in discussing various aspects of the language of the early 17th century as exemplified in Shakespearean drama, provide the reader with deeper insights into the meaning of Shakespearean text, often by reference to the social, literary and linguistic context of the time.

Adolf Glassbrenner (1810–1876) was a German humorist and satirist. The aim of this study is to show that Glassbrenner’s writings were rooted within the abstract idealism of the Young Germans. Special focus lies on the period between 1840 and 1849, Glassbrenner’s most active writing period, and representing most closely the elements of Humor and Tendenz. This study is of interest to everyone who wants to know more about the ideas behind the writings of Adolf Glassbrenner, but also to those who want to make a first acquaintance with this famous German writer.

This selection of the verse of Valencian poet Vicent Andres Estelles (1924-1993) is accompanied by a translation into English from the original Catalan. The format of an innovative dialogue with classical authors — a cornerstone of Estellesian expression — constitutes an ingenious invocation and parodic commentary on the output and ethos of the Latin poets Horace, Ovid, Virgil and Catullus, the medieval patriarch of Valencian letters Ausiàs March and the Renaissance Castilian poet, Garcilaso de la Vega. For Estellés, Octavian Rome provides a parallel to the Franco dictatorship and the historical framework surrounding these writers affords the neophyte an opportunity for ideological denunciation, creative wit and lyrical grace as well as righteous anger at the oppressive pettiness of life under autocracy. The translators have attempted to bring to an Anglophone readership the wealth of achievement of this writer who, despite the severity of fascist repression, sang and celebrated the experience of his own community through its own oppressed language.

Lance Hewson's book on translation criticism sets out to examine ways in which a literary text may be explored as a translation, not primarily to judge it, but to understand where the text stands in relation to its original by examining the interpretative potential that results from the translational choices that have been made. After considering theoretical aspects of translation criticism, Hewson sets out a method of analysing originals and their translations on three different levels. Tools are provided to describe translational choices and their potential effects, and applied to two corpora: Flaubert's <i>Madame Bovary </i>and six of the English translations, and Austen's <i>Emma</i>, with three of the French translations. The results of the analyses are used to construct a hypothesis about each translation, which is classified according to two scales of measurement, one distinguishing between "just" and "false" interpretations, and the other between "divergent similarity", "relative divergence", "radical divergence" and "adaptation".

The different contributions included in this volume deal with aspects of biographical writing and other similar genres (semblances, portraits, etc.). These articles analyze theoretical and generic questions as well as some of the most relevant examples of the genre – with a focus on those written in Catalan. In addition, some of the articles focus on the relationship between biography and national images (nation-building) from a sociocultural standpoint.<br />The Research Group on Contemporary Literature from the Universitat d’Alacant has gathered contributions from several specialists in numerous fields and has selected a group of relevant works for analysis. In addition to studies on authors such as André Maurois and Lytton Strachey, contributions deal with figures such as Josep Pla, Domènec Guansé, Josep Maria Espinàs and Agustí Pons. Finally, some contributions pay attention to the biographical genre in the audiovisual arts.<br />The volume contains contributions in Spanish, English, and Catalan.

This study of Góngora’s <i>Soledades</i> is intended to summarize and discuss some of the problems which seemed important for a better understanding of these poems. Special attention is paid to the two opposing ‘camps’ that developed over time; one mainly focussing on the form and the other on the content of <i>Soledades</i>. In this volume the authors tries to integrate the methods and results of both of the ‘camps’.

Given the fact that there are widely different types of text, it is unlikely that every text is processed in the same way. It is assumed here that for each text type, proficient readers have developed a particular cognitive control system, which regulates the basic operations of text comprehension. The book focuses on the comprehension of literary texts, which involves specific cognitive strategies that enable the reader to respond flexibly to the indeterminacies of the literary reading situation.
The study relies heavily on methods and theoretical conceptions from cognitive psychology and presents the results of experiments carried out with real readers. The results are not only relevant to research problems in literary theory, but also to the study of discourse comprehension in general.

This is a book about play practice rather than play theory. Of course, practice presupposes theory, but here the editors choose to keep general theoretical assumptions under cover rather then force them into explicitness. The contributors to this volume were given free rein to discuss whatsoever aspect of literary play caught their fancy. The absence of a predetermined theoretical framework has resulted in an idiosyntractic volume on the different forms of <i>play</i>.

<i>Author Representations in Literary Reading</i> investigates the role of the author in the mind of the reader. It is the first book-length empirical study on generated author inferences by readers of literature. It bridges the gap between theories which hold that the author is irrelevant and those that give him prominence. By combining insights and methods from both cognitive psychology and literary theory, this book contributes to a better understanding of how readers process literary texts and what role their assumptions about an author play. A series of experiments demonstrate that readers generate author inferences during the process of reading, which they use to create an image of the text’s author. The findings suggest that interpretations about the author play a pivotal role in the literary reading process. This book is relevant to scholars and students in all areas of the cognitive sciences, including literary studies and psychology.